Mr. Electric Brand Guidelines: A 1994 Dwyer Group Franchise, Now Part of Neighborly

A franchise built inside a group of trade brands.

Mr. Electric is an electrical-service franchise: locally owned businesses that do electrical repair and installation work for homes and businesses under one shared name. It was created by the Dwyer Group of Waco, Texas, and began franchising in 1994, the trade magazine EC&M reported in January 2004, when the brand was marking its tenth anniversary. The magazine described it then as one of the Dwyer Group’s six franchisor subsidiaries in the service trades, with more than 150 locations worldwide.

Its parent had been built by Don Dwyer Sr. Contracting Business reported in February 2007 that he started with a franchise of his own, the carpet-dyeing and cleaning company Rainbow International, which became the group’s flagship, after working as a Hollywood talent agent and then as a senior vice president of another Waco franchisor, and that the group then added franchises through acquisitions and start-ups. The magazine reported that by 1993 he had taken the company public on the Nasdaq market. In 2007 it listed Mr. Electric among the brands of a Dwyer Group franchise system with more than 1,300 locations worldwide, alongside Mr. Rooter, Glass Doctor and Aire Serv.

The name shares its form with other brands in the group: a courtesy title in front of a trade. English Wikipedia says Dwyer acquired Mr. Rooter, the drain-cleaning franchise founded in 1970, in the 1980s, and that the group’s brands grew to include Mr. Appliance, Mr. Electric and Mr. Handyman.

From the Dwyer Group to Neighborly and KKR.

Mr. Electric has changed hands only as its parent has. By 2015 the Dwyer Group was backed by the American private-equity firm The Riverside Company: in June that year PE Hub reported that the Waco holding company had bought The Grounds Guys, a lawn-care franchisor from Mono, Ontario, with some 40 locations in Canada, and earlier in 2015 the painting franchise Five Star Painting; the site described the Waco company as a holding company of franchise businesses. By September 2018 the group was owned by Harvest Partners, a New York private-equity firm.

On 20 September 2018 the group changed its corporate name to Neighborly, according to a release on the Harvest Partners website. The release says Neighborly had begun in 2017 as one consumer website through which homeowners could find local providers from all of the group’s franchise brands, that the group then held 21 service brands, and that the new name would appear at ten corporate campuses in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, employing nearly 850 people. In Canada the consumer site used the spelling Neighbourly. The trade brands, Mr. Electric among them, kept their own names under the new holding company.

In July 2021 the investment firm KKR agreed to buy Neighborly from Harvest Partners. Reporting the agreement on 8 July 2021, Contracting Business described a portfolio of 28 brands and more than 4,800 franchises, and named Mr. Electric as the group’s brand “in the electrical service arena,” alongside Aire Serv in heating and air conditioning and Mr. Rooter in plumbing. In an interview with the magazine, Neighborly’s chief executive, Mike Bidwell, described a cross-marketing model in which the group’s brands are promoted to one another’s customers. In September 2026 24/7 Wall St. wrote that KKR already owned Neighborly, “whose franchise brands cover plumbing, electrical, pest control, and HVAC,” and in October 2026 Franchise Times described Neighborly as “a portfolio company owned by KKR.”

Home-service franchises.

Home-service franchises sell work that happens inside someone else’s house, out of sight of the wider public, so much of their identity lives on the things that travel: the vehicle parked outside, the clothes the crew wears, the forms and checklists left behind, and the photographs of finished jobs that the companies publish on their own sites. The service itself is the product, and the brand has to stand in for it before the door opens.

Vehicles can carry much of that load. The Maids, the Omaha cleaning franchise founded in 1979, says on its franchise site that its four-person teams and a recognisable yellow company car became its calling card in the early years. The company still tells its founding story through that car, alongside the team of four.

Naming can be plain and functional, and some brands turn a method into a branded product: The Maids describes a numbered 22-Step Cleaning Process, and MaidPro, founded in Boston in 1991, cleans to what it calls a 49-Point Checklist, marked as a trademark. In both cases the company presents the routine as something every franchisee follows in the same order.

Behind the local names sit owners and parent groups, and their corporate pages are part of the picture. MaidPro has belonged since 2021 to Threshold Brands, a multi-brand franchise platform launched by the Riverside Company, Private Equity Wire reported in April 2021. The Maids was acquired in March 2020 in a deal backed by Gladstone Investment Corporation, which lists it on its portfolio pages. Customers meet the local franchise; the parent appears in investor releases, franchise-recruitment sites and the small print.

A national name run by local owners.

Much of the brand’s recent story is told through its franchise owners. In April 2023 the north Alabama news site 256 Today reported that Mr. Electric of Huntsville had broken ground on an office and warehouse of nearly 18,000 square feet in west Huntsville, part of a new development on Oakwood Road; the building was designed by the Huntsville firm Brown O’Dell Architects, with Wallace Construction as general contractor. Its owner, the site said, also ran Mr. Electric locations in Birmingham, Montgomery, Auburn, Chattanooga and Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and the Huntsville business employed 48 people, with 29 more across its other markets. The owner told the site he could remember being “just a single electrician with a truck.”

Larger investors have followed. In October 2026 Franchise Times reported that private-equity firms including Eagle Merchant Partners, Franchise Equity Partners and Main Post Partners had invested in multi-unit operators of Mr. Rooter, Mr. Electric and Precision Garage Door Service. The same month the magazine described private-equity sponsors as owning many of the large home-services platforms, naming Neighborly under KKR among them.

The name has namesakes to keep apart. Mr. Electric is not linked to Mister Sparky, an electrical franchise that Franchise Times places under a different group, Authority Brands.

For a design guide, Mr. Electric shows how a trade name written as a courtesy title can carry one service across hundreds of locally owned businesses. Compare Mr. Rooter, the older “Mr.” brand in the same group, and Neighborly, the parent company. For this guide we use a charcoal, a spark yellow and a cable red with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Mr. Electric’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.